Aruba Wireless Introduces the Aruba 2400 Wi-Fi Switching System
LONDON, England - November 20, 2003 /Wi-Fi Technology News/- Aruba Wireless Networks (http://www.arubanetworks.com) unveiled the newest member of its Wi-Fi switching family, the Aruba 2400 Wi-Fi switching system, a mid-range, centralized Wi-Fi switch for dense building environments.
The Aruba 2400, ideally suited for medium-sized business Wi-Fi deployments such as regional headquarters or dense office buildings, complements the Company's existing family of centralized Wi-Fi switching systems - the Aruba 800 for branch office environments and the Aruba 5000 for large campus networks.
With the 2400, Aruba becomes the only company to now provide purpose-built Wi-Fi switching solutions for all types of wireless deployments - from corporate campuses to regional headquarters, branch offices to hot spots - and giving IT administrators the flexibility to choose the platform best suited for their performance, scalability and price requirements.
"The Aruba 2400 is the only mid-range centralized Wi-Fi switch that can provide Wi-Fi switching, Wi-Fi security appliance and Wi-Fi IDS functions simultaneously," said Keerti Melkote, co-founder and vice president of Product Management at Aruba Wireless Networks. "It is designed for mid-sized businesses that can deploy a centralized Wi-Fi solution without having to break the bank."
Only Purpose-Built Wireless Switching Delivers Performance and Scalability
Unlike Wi-Fi platforms from incumbent wired vendors, the Aruba 2400 switches and processes both native Ethernet (802.3) and Wi-Fi (802.11) packets.
Traditional Ethernet switches don't support the ability to process and switch native 802.11 frames. In turn, 802.11 traffic must be converted to Ethernet frames at the point of entry, forcing APs to process and decrypt traffic. This results in the loss of valuable wireless information needed to optimize, secure and troubleshoot the network.
Additionally, traditional Ethernet switches are not equipped with the requisite processing power or software intelligence to provide services that are fundamental to operating an enterprise-class wireless network. When wireless software features, such as mobility or RF management, are added to existing wired switches, the general-purpose processor on these switches is forced to handle the added chores thereby negatively affecting performance and scalability.
Like all Aruba Wi-Fi switches, the 2400 is built around a distributed wireless processing architecture that uses discrete processors for controlling wireless traffic, encrypting and decrypting packets, and parsing wireless frames to provide value-added application services.
The Aruba 2400 is also optimized for supporting voice communications over wireless. To ensure no degradation in service quality, low latency (sub-10 millisecond) handoffs happen in the Aruba switch. New software enhancements add call admission control and active call management for voice traffic. And flow classification, unique to Aruba Wi-Fi switches, ensures that voice traffic is prioritized on the wire as well as in the air.
Aruba 2400 Speeds and Feeds
The Aruba 2400 is a single rack unit, fixed-configuration Wi-Fi switching system that supports up to 512 simultaneous users and 48 access points (APs). The Aruba 2400 comes equipped with 24 10/100 Mbps Ethernet ports providing integrated serial and power over Ethernet (802.3af and Cisco proprietary) along with two flexible Gigabit Ethernet uplinks.
A powerful and programmable hardware engine integrated into the Aruba 2400 delivers up to 2 gigabits of encrypted (IPsec) throughput. Aruba APs or third-party APs are supported by the 2400 through either direct connections or indirectly through an existing L2/L3 wired network.
With a click of a mouse, the Aruba 2400 can function as a Wi-Fi multiplexer, a Wi-Fi appliance or a full-fledged Wi-Fi switch. It supports the entire complement of AirOS software and AirOS applications that add sophisticated RF features such as wireless intrusion detection, mobile firewalling and RF management. Each Aruba 2400 comes equipped with the base AirOS systems along with Aruba's RF Director management application.
Pricing and Availability
Available in December, the Aruba 2400 is priced starting at US $4,995 with additional AirOS software applications that add Wi-Fi switching and RF management, wireless intrusion detection and VPNs and firewalls, priced at US $4,000 each.
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